What Are Twitter Impressions and Why Are They a Vital Metric?

In the first quarter of 2018, Twitter reported an average of 336 million users per month, so if you’re not on the social media platform, you need to be!

All those Twitter marketing terms can be confusing. We’re going to break them all down and answer the most important questions of all – what are Twitter impressions and why are they important?

Why Should You Use Twitter to Market Your Brand?

Twitter started in 2006 as a form of micro-blogging. At the time, you could post as much as you wanted as long as it was less than 140 characters and no more than 1000 tweets a day. Today, those numbers have jumped to 280 and 2400, respectively, which has helped brands reach their desired audience even more.

And who is the biggest audience on Twitter? Millennials! 36% of adults under 30 are tweeting their daily thoughts, getting breaking news, and following their favorite sports, celebrities, and brands on Twitter.

Even though it now uses an algorithm, Twitter doesn’t fully hinder a user from seeing tweets, regardless if they’re from a personal friend or a major corporation.

Over the years, Twitter has added a business section called Twitter Ads, where you can pay for Promoted Tweets, Promoted Accounts, or Promoted Trends. Twitter makes it clear with a “promoted” icon that it’s a paid tweet.

Their method of transparency in this regard has helped brands as far as engagement goes. One poll found that 77% of Twitter users have interacted with a promoted tweet in some way.

Do you need to pay for a Twitter Ad to promote your brand? Absolutely not! Many brands still use organic tweets to market their product or services and Twitter even encourages it.

What Is an Organic Tweet?

An organic tweet is a tweet that is not promoted. In other words, it’s just opening your Twitter app and typing your message in 280 characters or less without paying for it. Most individual accounts send organic tweets, some celebrity accounts excluded.

What Does Engagement Mean?

Engagement refers to the number of times a user interacted with a tweet. It includes replies, “liking” the tweet, re-tweets, clicking on a link, clicking on a hashtag, following the tweet’s author, expanding the tweet, and so on.

Engagement is the key to the following two terms that are mentioned often when it comes to Twitter metrics: Reach and impressions.

What Is Twitter Reach?

Reach or potential reach is the number of people who may see your tweet. It includes your followers but also takes into account their followers as well.

For example, if you have 50 followers and send a tweet, that tweet’s reached 50 potential people. If one of your followers has 100 followers of their own and re-tweets you, that tweet now reached a potential of 150 people.

What Are Twitter Impressions?

You may be wondering, “What are tweet impressions anyway?” In fact, that question may be how you ended up reading this blog!

To keep it as simple as possible, a twitter impression or a tweet impression is the total number of times a particular tweet has been seen. This includes not only the times it appeared in your followers’ timelines, but the times it shows up in a search and from a user “liking” it and/or re-tweeting it.

However, it doesn’t include an embedded tweet in a blog post or seen on a third-party social media platform.

Why Are Impressions Important?

The number of impressions on Twitter is becoming more important to brands because it is the modern equivalent of old-school marketing like responses to mailers or opened e-mails.

Impressions help a brand gauge the potential they have of being seen and with research showing that 50% of consumers who are engaged with a brand buy their products or services, the importance is pretty clear.

How To Get More Twitter Impressions

It would be pretty easy to tell you that “tweeting better” is a great way to increase your impressions but that isn’t exactly helpful, is it?

When you look at your Twitter Analytics and see a low number of impressions but you have a healthy follower account, your followers may be inactive. For the first few years after its start, Twitter bots were a big problem. Over the years, the company has tried to limit these accounts but they still count in your follower total.

You may also have followers who currently use a different Twitter account from the one they followed you with. They could have locked themselves out of their original account or wanted to start a new profile. Like bots, these “old” accounts still count toward your follower total.

Likewise, if you have a high impression number but a low engagement rate, you should try something simple like tweeting at different times of the day, keeping your target demographic in mind. The more engagement you have, the higher your impressions will be; in a way, they go hand in hand.

Since Twitter changed their algorithm in 2015, the brands with the highest number of impressions are the brands who are the most engaging.

It may seem a little overwhelming, but try to answer every tweet that pops up in your mentions. The more you show your potential customers you’re interested in what they have to say, the more love they’ll give your brand and the higher your impression number will be.

Whether you decide to use Promoted Tweets, organic tweets, or a combination of both, increasing your potential impressions on Twitter can drive your brand in new and exciting ways you haven’t considered.

Get Out There and Be Seen

Now that the questions, “What are twitter impressions and why are they important?” are answered, you may be wondering what your next step is. Our blog has all the answers you need from how to brand yourself properly on social media to different ways of boosting your social media marketing ideas.